Julia Garon-Bissonnette

Vanderbilt University | Vander Bilt · Peabody College of Education and Human Development

Background: Childhood maltreatment impacts parenting and has intergenerational consequences. It is therefore crucial to identify clinically responsive resilience-promoting factors in pregnant women and expecting men with history of childhood maltreatment. Mentalization, or reflective functioning, appears as a promising concept to understand risk a...

Introduction: Prenatal maternal distress has a negative impact on the course of pregnancy, fetal development, offspring development and later psychopathologies. The study aimed to determine the extent to which the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic may aggravate pregnant women prenatal distress and psychiatric symptomatology. Material a...

Background Recent evidence suggests that offspring of mothers having been exposed to childhood abuse and neglect (CA&N) are at increased risk of developmental problems and that boys are more affected by maternal CA&N than girls. Since impairments in reflective functioning (RF) have been associated with maternal CA&N and offspring development, RF co...

Background Women and men having been exposed to childhood trauma would be at high risk of various mental health symptoms while awaiting a child. This study aimed to evaluate the association between cumulative childhood trauma and the accumulation of symptoms belonging to different psychiatric problems in pregnant women and expecting men. Methods W...

Childhood maltreatment is theorized as impeding the development of reflective functioning (RF; ability to perceive and interpret oneself and others in terms of mental states). However, previous research typically failed to support this association or yielded small sized and mixed associations. This study aims to provide a deeper look at the associa...

Given the relevance of caregivers' perceptions, cognitions, and emotions about their child's mental states for caregiving behavior and children's development, researchers from multiple theoretical perspectives have developed constructs to assess caregivers' cognitions, resulting in a large but scattered body of literature. In this article, we highl...

Resolving trauma may contribute to mental health and parenting in mother with histories of childhood maltreatment. The concept of trauma-specific reflective functioning (T-RF) was developed to assess the complexity of thought processes regarding trauma. The study aimed to validate the T-RF scale applied to the Trauma Meaning-Making Interview by exa...

Purpose Mothers’ reported connection, or bond, with their infants develops across the early postnatal period and is relevant to mother and offspring functioning. Little is known, however, about early predictors of bonding difficulties over time. The present study examined prenatal anxiety, depressive symptoms, and trait mindfulness and variation in...

The previously observed heterogeneity in developmental and intergenerational trajectories of childhood trauma may root from interindividual differences in the way trauma-exposed individuals have resolved these experiences. The current study explored whether distinctive patterns of impaired mentalization in relation to trauma could be identified in...

Links between reflective functioning (RF; the ability to conceive of mental states and to interpret human behavior accordingly) and concurrent attachment security have been found in both childhood and adulthood. However, the respective contributions of early and concurrent attachment security in adult RF remain unknown. This study examines the cont...

The birth of a child has been associated with a decline in couple satisfaction, which has implications for the child's social‐emotional development. This study investigated the potential spillover effect on pregnant women's perceptions of their relationships with their partners of the Supporting the Transition to and Engagement in Parenthood (STEP)...

Men who have a history of childhood maltreatment may be at risk of experiencing significant challenges during the transition to parenthood, which might be explained by the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Using a nonclinical community sample of 230 expecting fathers, the aims of the current study were as follows (1) to in...

Introduction Childhood trauma is not restricted to abuse or neglect and other potentially traumatic experiences need to be pondered in practice and research. The study aimed to collect validity evidence of a new measure of exposure to a broad range of potentially traumatic experiences, the Childhood Interpersonal Trauma Inventory (CITI), by evaluat...

The interdisciplinary field of developmental psychopathology has made great strides by including context into theoretical and empirical approaches to studying risk and resilience. Perhaps no context is more important to the developing child than their relationships with their caregivers (typically a child’s parents), as caregivers are a key source...

An increase in maternal prenatal psychological distress (PD), operationalized here as anxio-depressive symptomato- logy, has been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic (Berthelot et al., 2020) and been associated with infant developmental delays as early as two months old (Duguay et al., 2021). Furthermore, parents who experienced childhood trauma...

An important body of literature documented a drop in marital satisfaction during the transition to parenthood. Such difficulties could lead to more childcare stress, reduced postpartum communication, and less couple intimacy (Bogdan, 2022). This study aims to evaluate the collateral effects of the STEP program, a prenatal mentalization-based interv...

Childhood trauma is frequent in the general population of pregnant women and has been associated with complex psychological symptoms and neurobiological alterations during the perinatal period. These problems may in turn represent risk factors for offspring early development. However, little is known about the association between maternal trauma an...

The COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a global increase in psychological distress in pregnant women. This study evaluated the effects of STEP-COVID, a six-session mentalization-based prenatal group program offered online during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 100 participants were allocated to STEP-COVID or to the natural trajectory of prenatal...

Contexte : La pandémie de COVID-19 a été associée à une augmentation de la détresse psychologique chez les femmes enceintes. Le présent article vise à évaluer l’acceptabilité du programme STEP-COVID (Soutenir la Transition et l’Engagement dans la Parentalité dans le contexte de la pandémie de COVID-19), une intervention prénatale de groupe en ligne...

Background An upsurge in psychological distress was documented in pregnant women during the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated with a longitudinal design whether prenatal and postnatal maternal distress during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with lower infant socioemotional development. Methods Pregnant women (N = 468, M age = 30,00, 97.6% Wh...

Background Genetically high-risk children carry indicators of brain dysfunctions that adult patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder display. The accumulation of risk indicators would have a higher predictive value of a later transition to psychosis or mood disorder than each individual risk indicator. Since more than 50% of adult patients r...

Background: Childhood trauma would negatively affect pregnant women's mental health and would have intergenerational repercussions. However, there is a paucity of prenatal interventions specifically designed for women exposed to childhood trauma. The study aims to evaluate the acceptability of STEP, a manualized group intervention designed for preg...

( Acta Obstet Gynecol Scand . 2020;99:848–855) It is well established that psychological distress in pregnancy is associated with a range of negative outcomes, including delivery at an earlier gestational age, lower neonatal birthweight, and poor maternal psychosocial functioning. Expectant mothers of all social classes and educational levels can e...

Background The way people process trauma and adverse relationships may be more predictive of subsequent adaptation than trauma exposure in itself. However, there is currently no self-report instrument assessing failures in the mentalization of trauma and adverse relationships. Objective We developed the Failure to Mentalize Trauma Questionnaire (F...

Objective: Examine the association between news media use frequency during the COVID-19 pandemic and the scale of psychological distress in pregnant women, considering this distress known harmful effects on the fetus development. Method: Pregnant women living in Quebec province (N = 1014) have been recruited in April 2020 through social media, w...

The damaging consequences of child abuse and neglect for child development and psychiatric disorders have been known for decades. However, there would be a relative paucity of translational research on childhood maltreatment in comparison to the numerous correlational studies in the field. To assess the extent to which previous research on childhoo...

Introduction Exposure to childhood abuse or neglect may lead to negative outcomes during pregnancy in expecting parents, which may contribute to a negative experience of childbearing and have consequences for the developing fetus. This study examined the associations between exposure to childhood abuse or neglect, psychological symptoms, prenatal a...

Background Childhood maltreatment affects one third of children and adolescents and constitutes one of the costliest public health burdens of our societies. In the last two decades, we observed an explosion of research on childhood trauma in the field of schizophrenia and early exposure to trauma has been associated with endophenotypes of schizophr...